Can tuples be replaced with lists all the time?
Terry Reedy
tjreedy at udel.edu
Sat Mar 1 18:15:10 EST 2014
On 3/1/2014 4:20 PM, Mark Lawrence wrote:
> On 23/02/2014 17:48, Roy Smith wrote:
>> It also appears that tuples are more memory efficient. I just ran some
>> quick tests on my OSX box. Creating a list of 10 million [1, 2, 3, 4,
>> 5] lists gave me a 1445 MB process. The name number of (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
>> tuples was 748 MB. I'm sure this is implementation dependent, but it
>> seems plausible to assume similar results will be had on other
>> implementations.
The numbers sound right.
> In CPython a list is overallocated so there's usually spare slots
> available if you want to add something to it. In contrast you know when
> you create the tuple just how big it is so no overallocation is needed.
Besides which, in CPython, a tuple is one block of memory, with a
PyObject header followed by the object references, while a list uses 2
blocks of memory. The first has a PyObject header, followed by a
reference to the list block, its allocated length (minimum 8 I believe),
and its current in-use length. The over-allocated list block, which must
also start on a 4 or 8 byte alignment boundary, has the object
references plus extra space.
--
Terry Jan Reedy
More information about the Python-list
mailing list